State pilot program provides incentives for graduation

Leonardo Casillas is only a junior at Lynn Classical High School and has yet to apply to college, but the state of Massachusetts has already given him a scholarship.

Casillas, who is 17, is one of a select 25 students this year who received the Christian Herter Memorial Scholarship, part of more than $127 million a year in taxpayer-funded scholarships, grants, no-interest loans and tuition waivers provided to students toward the cost of public or private higher education in or out of state.

The son of a single mother of four, Casillas is planning to use the money to study engineering or the sciences. And he has no doubt he'll finish college.

“Of course I'm going to get a degree. There's no possible way that I will give up,” Casillas said. “I have an obligation to my mother. I have an obligation to my school. I have an obligation to the people who have helped me. I'm not stopping.”

But, until recently, the state didn't know whether recipients of any of that $127 million a year in scholarships, grants and other aid ever actually graduated. At a time when producing more college-educated workers is a priority of the Deval Patrick administration, state officials still have no way of tracking whether students who accept state-funded financial aid and go to private colleges and universities — more than 40 percent of the total — ever get degrees.

Of the full-time, degree-seeking recipients of the MASSGrant financial aid program who started public colleges and universities in 2005 — the first group the state has followed through the process — 17.5 percent finished two-year associate degrees within three years. Just over 60 percent earned four-year bachelor's degrees within six, according to records provided to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting by the Department of Higher Education.

That's not significantly different from the graduation rates of other Massachusetts students, said Jonathan Keller, the state's associate commissioner of higher education for research and planning.

“For decades, higher education has been about access, and no one really focused on whether anybody graduated,” said Stan Jones, president of the advocacy organization Complete College America, speaking of the graduation rates of state financial-aid recipients nationwide. “I guess we assumed that they did. But as people looked closer, it appeared that they didn't.”

The nearly $11 billion a year states collectively provide in grants for college students, which comes on top of more than $36 billion allocated by the federal government, “has so far been a one-sided partnership,” said Jones, a former commissioner of higher education in Indiana. “The states provide the funds,” he said, “but the expectations states have of students are really pretty low” in terms of whether they ever actually earn degrees.

Massachusetts spent $86.9 million on grants and scholarships and $40.2 million on no-interest loans, tuition waivers and other aid in the 2009-2010 academic year, the last period for which the figures are available, according to the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs. That's up 43 percent in five years, and an average of $769 per student who received assistance. Forty percent of the total, or $35 million, goes to students attending private colleges and universities.

Now, as policymakers struggle to boost the number of people with degrees, state officials have begun a small pilot program that will try to leverage financial aid to encourage recipients to graduate.

“We shouldn't view financial aid simply as an entitlement,” said Richard Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education, who said he was speaking for only himself and not the Board of Higher Education.

Under the pilot program, launched in the fall at 11 campuses, the more courses they take, the more money students get — up to an additional $2,000 a year. Those campuses are the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Lowell; Fitchburg, Framingham and Salem state universities; Springfield Tech; as well as Bunker Hill, Mass. Bay, Massasoit, Middlesex and Quinsigamond community colleges.

Research by Complete College America and others shows that taking a full complement of courses helps speed up graduation. Yet 72 percent of full-time community college students nationwide, and 30 percent of students at four-year universities, take fewer than the recommended 24 credits in their freshman years, and quickly fall behind, Complete College America reports.

The Massachusetts experiment follows similar tests in states including West Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio and New Mexico, where early results show that connecting financial aid with meeting certain benchmarks has increased the number of credits earned and the proportion of students who return from one year to the next. In Louisiana, it has also resulted in higher grades.

The Massachusetts program so far involves a modest 2,000 of the 44,000 annual recipients of state grants, no-interest loans and tuition waivers. It will run on this small scale until 2016, when the results will be analyzed, officials said.

There's already one incentive for Massachusetts aid recipients to graduate as quickly as they can: The money in the principal grant program, MASSGrant, runs out after eight semesters, a deadline that will continue under the pilot program. And, in fact, while the recipients — most of whom qualify for the grants because they come from families with low incomes — have about the same graduation rates as students who don't get state aid, a larger percentage of them finish, on average, compared to low-income students nationally, who often face family or financial pressures or arrive in college poorly prepared.

“We're looking at a disadvantaged population in the first place that would traditionally perform at a lower rate,” said Keller, the research and planning head.

State officials and many experts also caution that it's unrealistic to expect every college student to graduate, and that a portion may benefit from a higher education without necessarily receiving a degree, or find it's not for them. Some may drop out to start a business, they say.

Raising graduation rates, however, has become a goal of federal and state politicians, employers and foundations worried about a potential shortage of college-educated workers.

In Massachusetts, slightly half of residents have associate degrees or higher, a number Complete College America says will have to rise to 70 percent by the end of this decade to meet the expected demand.

There are also concerns that, with huge pressure to curb government spending, financial aid programs will be vulnerable to budget cuts if they can't be shown to boost graduation rates.

Some in academia, however, worry that a single-minded focus on graduation rates could force universities to significantly ease degree requirements, or accept only those applicants who are most likely to graduate, rather than taking risks on seemingly marginal students with potential.

Some states are using financial aid to affect not only students' behavior, but that of universities and colleges. In California, for example, officials have blocked students from using money from the CalGrant program to go to institutions — mostly private, for-profit schools — with low graduation rates and high student-loan default rates.

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting, www.necir-bu.org, is a nonprofit investigative reporting newsroom based at Boston University.